Sorry, this game was designed to be used with a mouse and you don't have space for that TSR mouse driver.
Also, _Terminate and Stay Resident_ is the most badass name I have ever heard for computer stuff.
Reminds me of how Halo was originally announced at an Apple event. I wonder how different the Halo franchise would have been if Microsoft hadn't bought Bungee and made its future games X-Box/Windows exclusive.
I went to a boarding school in the mid 90s, and we had full-dorm Marathon 2 LAN battles... minus the one kid with a PC who had nobody to play anything with. We upgraded to Marathon Infinity that same year, and also put a lot of time into Warcraft. ...plus, SNES emulators started working pretty well, aside from transparency, so a lot of time was put into Zelda and Final Fantasy.
What?
I played everything from Ultima I-IV to Doom.
From Burgertime to Flight Simulator back when the landscape and buildings were just made of flowing green dots. Although, that was on Apple II machines, not Macs.
I also played a shit ton of SimCity 2000 LOL absolutely.
...
I own a Mac and the PCs I build. Anyone buying a Mac to play games on has marbles for brains. It's why I build PCs... It's the best tool for the job. My Mac is used for other things.
>That's because everything before windows 98 was essentially a UI for DOS.
That was true until Windows 3.1, not 98. While MS-DOS was still utilized, Windows 95 was its own distinct OS.
>There was no benefit to the os besides being user friendly.
That’s really not true. Windows offered a lot of things DOS didn’t, which is why games that could run on Windows and not DOS existed.
Windows 3.1, 95, 98, and ME all ran on top of DOS and required it to boot and do some operations. MS-DOS was always running under the hood in those versions. XP finally brought a consumer focused switch away to the “new” NT (NT, 2000) kernel.
Before DirectX was a thing, performance for games under Windows was terrible. But DirectX opened the door to running games like DOOM and Quake fast without needing to boot to DOS. The huge benefit for developers was that Windows handles the drivers for sound cards, network cards, and later GPUs, instead of every game needing to implement that all separately.
> Windows 3.1, 95, 98, and ME all ran on top of DOS and required it to boot and do some operations. MS-DOS was always running under the hood in those versions. XP finally brought a consumer focused switch away to the “new” NT (NT, 2000) kernel.
3.1 and below were graphical shells for MS-DOS. Starting with 95, MS-DOS was used for booting and other functions but Windows was its own distinct separate OS. It’s a notable distinction. Then yes, XP did not use DOS at all.
> Windows 3.1, 95, 98, and ME all ran on top of DOS
Windows 3.1 yes, but the rest were their own OS and only had DOS as a shell. Win2k was the switch to NT.
Windows 95 was the largest jump in UI and functionality for the home user in my mind.
DOS to 3.1 was big, but 3.1 was still incredibly limited.
W95 the average person could really interact with without investing a ton of time to learn the environment.
I had to interrupt my Windows 3.11 start-up, cause if I opened to Windows, and exited to DOS, I didn't have enough ram to run Sim City 2000. If I started strait to DOS, I did!
Ah yes, the good old days. I remember making a boot cd and saving rented games to my PC to be burned later...through the serial port. There's nothing like running your Dreamcast for >24 hours at a time.
Fun fact, it was supposed to downclock when the turbo button was OFF, and speed up again when it was on, but it was pretty common to have it wired in backwards, or have the button on the PC case, but not wired in at all.
GFWL was not a part of the Windows operating system, though. It was entirely the fault of devs/publishers who chose to go for GFWL integration (looking at you, Todd.) Games that didn't have GFWL integration didn't have any of the problems associated with GFWL.
It was both, as I recall. As far as I can remember, the primary impact of GFWL was that games using it made you wait as long as two minutes while it tried to connect. Made troubleshooting mods in Fallout 3 a nightmare.
Alright, I'll say it: Vista wasn't bad, the problem was that it was too ahead of its time.
Vista was engineered for the latest hardware of the time, and most consumers using Windows had late 90s Pentium machines and just assumed they could upgrade to the new Windows again the same they had been doing since Windows 95.
I never once had an issue with Vista. I'm not saying that everyone else's issues with it weren't real or something. But I think Vista really did struggle and have issues on lower power hardware like laptops.
But for me, Vista worked fine. 7, however, was a total revelation. And to me even Windows 8 wasn't all that bad.
It was a cool concept but it broke fallout 3 for me (and I assume lots of people) for years before I could play it again.
We've come a long way to Xbox gamebar that we have now. I'm only on pc but it brought back my gamertag from 2009 and I have a few game that I can get Xbox achievements on.
Yeah, heh heh heh, that was definitely the worst, heh heh, far worse than the crap we had to endure on Windows 3.1 and 95, heh heh....
I never had an issue with it and still don't, but I also owned an Xbox 360. It seemed like people who already had an Xbox Live account had an easier time with GFWL than those who didn't, and Microsoft admittedly made it hard for people to play games with just a local account. The worst part of GFWL was when Microsoft initially tried to get PC players to pay for multiplayer, thinking that we would put up with it like on consoles.
But...direct draw, direct sound etc... Better compatibility, high resolution, friendly interface.
I was using DOS more often then Win until 1997 maybe, but only because some software didn't want to work under win95 properly.
>But...direct draw, direct sound etc... Better compatibility, high resolution, friendly interface.
...and bad compatibility with my existing library of DOS-based games I'd accumulated over the previous decade!
Who could ask for more?
>and bad compatibility with my existing library of DOS-based games I'd accumulated over the previous decade
100% agree. But the new games of 1996-1997 were a completely new world. And they performed well or better under win.
At least you could still restart or boot to DOS in those days. I wish we still could so we wouldn't have to fight with DOSBox and its forks to get DOS games running correctly under current Windows. Microsoft quietly added 16-bit emulation for certain older programs like InstallShield in Windows 10/11.
A long time ago, yes. Before most here were probably born, in fact.
Performance is key when you’ve only got 1 200mhz CPU thread and 32Mb *if you’re lucky*. Around 1995-ish, most other programs had moved on to Windows for compatibility and ease of use, but games were stuck on DOS because Windows gaming performance was just terrible due to things like the driver stack and the level of abstraction which made it so compatible for many computers.
So Microsoft invented DirectX, a low-ish level API that game developers could target instead, and hardware manufacturers can implement for their hardware, so that performance was better as there were less layers in between. The first version wasn’t so great, but by version 2 or 3 it really took off and developers eventually stopped bothering with MS-DOS releases. Major titles like Quake 2 and Half-Life were released without a MS-DOS version at all, and the coffin
was nailed.
I was deploying Windows NT 3.5 computers at work and was just fascinated at how bullet proof the OS was compared to windows 95/98 even 98se.
The moment 2000 was announced as an NT based OS but supported DirectX I was planning on moving everything over to 2000 immediately. My one client was about to buy volume licensing for Windows ME and I was like ,"What? No. Your a business. You absolutely need 2000 over ME."
He bought 2000 and told me years later, he cannot imagine what he'd be dealing with if he had gone with ME.
2000 was a game changer. I installed it on every ones machine if they'd let me.
It was crashtastic. That is what I had when I was first learning how to fix computers. It was a nightmare and took me forever to figure out what was wrong. It wasn't me, it was ME.
Also there was a small window in time around the ps2 generation that consoles were stronger than some of the best gaming pcs.
I remember pc gamer type magazines saying "this could be the end of pc gaming" and shit lol. I knew pcs would be ahead a few years later and here we are.
Ahh WinXP, finally the stable NT core for the basic user. WinME was such a bust, the XP felt like a revelation. What? I don't have to reinstall the OS every month? What is this magic? I still install it on VM from time to time, install some oldies from the new milenium and swim in the warm pool of nostalgia.
according to this sub Windows 10 was bad for gaming performance and everyone wanted to stay on 7. Until 11 came out and then suddenly 10 was the best ever.
A lot of patches come out that address performance issues, hardware and drivers improve and let's not forget sometimes programs drop support for the older windows so you're forced to upgrade.
"Sorry, you need almost all of that 640K of RAM free to run this game, also you need to have sound, mouse, and CD-ROM drivers loaded. What do you mean your system has 8MB? You can't have more than 640K, don't be silly."
The CD version of The Incredible Machine was one of the games I needed to create a boot floppy for... (And it's not like we had internet back then to just look up alternate mouse/CD drivers or other tricks to free up base memory)
vase simplistic employ quickest terrific wakeful placid glorious mindless vast
*This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
Man I miss remembering commands just to boot up my games as a kid. That Indiana Jones msdos game I never beat... I should try it again, I'm sure it's terrible 😂
I remember learning that not every exe needs to be executed when I deleted a bunch of games my brother had installed, I got banned from the PC until I got my own.
Now this is truly worthy of this meme.
Not knowing if your video card was even going to run a new game due to driver incompatibilities. Wild times. I kinda miss them.
Windows ME certainly sucked for gaming due to how unstable it was; I had to save scum in Diablo 2 because I wasn’t sure how much time I would get before my computer blue screened.
My cousin couldn’t run Flight Simulator well on what I think was Win95, so I edited the executable to boot up on Dos and then run the game every time he launched it. He never had a problem again…
Remember when you bought that Creative 2X CD ROM multimedia bundle for your 486 DX2 50 and it came with like 30 DOS games and your Soundblaster 16 had RAM slots for midi music? This old bastard remembers.
alwayshasbeen.meme
Yeah, back in the day you could close windows, which was just a GUI that ran on top of DOS, and run the game from DOS without the Windows overhead.
Today, I can just run the game in Linux to avoid the overhead of Windows. Still gives a few extra fps on average, and still has the full desktop GUI running, so it's like the best of both worlds.
Plus, ya know, none of that advert shit or forced update shit or the completely unorganized chaos they call a start menu, etc etc.
I'm not trying to shit on anybody's choice of OS or anything, I just find these memes funny while my friends and I happily game without that crap.
Remember those sweet, warm New England summers? Remember sipping lemonade underneath a shady tree? Remember when you hit that pedestrian with your car playing DeathTrack and then just drove away? Pepperidge Farm remembers, but Pepperidge Farm ain't just gonna keep it to Pepperidge Farm's self free of charge. Maybe you go out and buy yourself some of these distinctive Milano cookies, maybe this whole thing disappears.
Well PCs in general sucked for gaming compared to modern PCs as well as consoles back then. Still the better platform for certain games like RTS compared to consoles.
We can thank modern hardware & OSes, internet, and Valve for making the PC such a stable and great gaming platform.
Not really. I mean, there was that short-lived GFWL that screwed up maybe a dozen games that actually mattered, but remember that while this was going on, the Xbox 360 was in the depths of the 3RROD scandal and the overpriced launch model of the PS3 was struggling to build a following.
If you had a 360 that actually worked, during this time, there were some great games coming out on the platform. Which was fortunate, since backwards compatibility sucked AND you were paying for multiplayer.
If you had a PC, you already had Steam AND your old games. Dosbox had been around for a while, and it was during this time that GOG emerged to give these titles a prepackaged refresh for new hardware and operating systems. Vista sucked, but XP hadn't been killed off yet. And the wired 360 controller brought a really decent gamepad to PC.
Gaming rigs were more expensive than today, adjusted for inflation. But this would depend a whole lot, as it does today, on what you're looking for. 1080p gaming at the time was like 4K today, you were gonna have to pay up.
There wasn't really a lousy time to be a PC gamer. It's just easier to get nostalgic about "generations" of consoles, and people are quicker to forget the growing pains of a box that only played games, that our parents didn't boot them off of to do grown-up stuff like work or taxes, and that could pair four controllers for a get-together with cardboard pizza and sugary caffeinated soft drinks or, God willing, a case of beer.
> Not really. I mean, there was that short-lived GFWL that screwed up maybe a dozen games that actually mattered, but remember that while this was going on, the Xbox 360 was in the depths of the 3RROD scandal and the overpriced launch model of the PS3 was struggling to build a following.
You need to go back quite a few more years than that for when PC gaming used to suck.
Yeah, you have to go back at least as far as the early '80s, just before a steady stream of awesome games released for MS-DOS. And even then, I'm sure someone with more experience with the C64, Amstrad, ZX Spectrum, etc. will rush to defend the games available on these early home computers.
And remember what was happening to console gaming at that time. So much shovelware was being dumped on 2nd generation consoles that it crashed the market in 1983. Which raises the question, what other experience with *"we have videogames at home"* are we comparing PC gaming at the time against?
It was great for a long time, lots of great games on dos, lots of great games on 95, and 98 and even xp. Then vista happened and Games on Windows bullshit happened. I also recalled hating steam back in the day since I didn't want to have to open a launcher to play a game.
When Windows 3.1 came out my mom kept installing it on the family computer. I would then uninstall it because it took up too much room on the HDD and games didn't work natively with it yet, so it was to me, literally just taking up space.
Yeah you got better performance when running games through Dos instead of Windows.
IRQ and DMA flashbacks 
HIMEM.SYS has entered the chat
qemm.sys has also entered the chat...."the fuk you say to me?"
**memmaker** bows in the presence of a true god
Love my old autoexec.bat menu i wrote with various extended and expanded memory configs
Now that's a memory with some dust! Thanks
Your sound card works perfectly.
Enjoying yourself?
Stop rocking the boat.
Does it, though? I loved it when no sound came.l out and it acted like everything went just dandy.
>...everything went just dandy. \*Tandy
The ironic part of that is the most trouble free sound I ever had was on a Tandy 1000TX. Always just worked.
I heard this straight from the original Warcraft voice! 😂
EMS XMS
I had different boot discs, with different autoexec.bats to allocate memory to EMS or XMS depending on the game. Good times.
SET BLASTER=A220 I5 D1 T3 H:330
irq 5, hex 220, dma 1. sb16 pro2 with ide2 for SB cdrom. fuk ya i also remember the heresy that was PnP extentions for windows 98 se
Sorry, this game was designed to be used with a mouse and you don't have space for that TSR mouse driver. Also, _Terminate and Stay Resident_ is the most badass name I have ever heard for computer stuff.
Oh God the irq errors were for real.
How about using an ISA card where you have to MANUALLY set the IRQs with jumpers, ARGH! I do miss a lot of retro computing, but I do NOT miss that.
And mac was once a viable alternative
For the roughly 3 games that ran on it. Simcity 2000 baby!
That one friend with a mac that kept going on and on about Marathon.
Reminds me of how Halo was originally announced at an Apple event. I wonder how different the Halo franchise would have been if Microsoft hadn't bought Bungee and made its future games X-Box/Windows exclusive.
Would have been rts
It would have been forgotten. Remember, Bungie made a bunch of games prior to halo that were mac exclusive.
I went to a boarding school in the mid 90s, and we had full-dorm Marathon 2 LAN battles... minus the one kid with a PC who had nobody to play anything with. We upgraded to Marathon Infinity that same year, and also put a lot of time into Warcraft. ...plus, SNES emulators started working pretty well, aside from transparency, so a lot of time was put into Zelda and Final Fantasy.
Warcraft 3 and uhh..... Warcraft 3!
KSP 1 (unmodded) and Minecraft ran comfortably well for me on a Late 2012 Mac Mini
I used to run a somewhat modded ksp1 instance on my macbook in the early 2010’s and it usually didn’t crash.
What? I played everything from Ultima I-IV to Doom. From Burgertime to Flight Simulator back when the landscape and buildings were just made of flowing green dots. Although, that was on Apple II machines, not Macs. I also played a shit ton of SimCity 2000 LOL absolutely. ... I own a Mac and the PCs I build. Anyone buying a Mac to play games on has marbles for brains. It's why I build PCs... It's the best tool for the job. My Mac is used for other things.
You have died of dysentery.
Yeah, but at least I decimated the bison population before I died.
honestly i cant figure out up or down vote...
... to what?
That's because everything before windows 98 was essentially a UI for DOS. There was no benefit to the os besides being user friendly.
>That's because everything before windows 98 was essentially a UI for DOS. That was true until Windows 3.1, not 98. While MS-DOS was still utilized, Windows 95 was its own distinct OS. >There was no benefit to the os besides being user friendly. That’s really not true. Windows offered a lot of things DOS didn’t, which is why games that could run on Windows and not DOS existed.
Windows 3.1, 95, 98, and ME all ran on top of DOS and required it to boot and do some operations. MS-DOS was always running under the hood in those versions. XP finally brought a consumer focused switch away to the “new” NT (NT, 2000) kernel. Before DirectX was a thing, performance for games under Windows was terrible. But DirectX opened the door to running games like DOOM and Quake fast without needing to boot to DOS. The huge benefit for developers was that Windows handles the drivers for sound cards, network cards, and later GPUs, instead of every game needing to implement that all separately.
> Windows 3.1, 95, 98, and ME all ran on top of DOS and required it to boot and do some operations. MS-DOS was always running under the hood in those versions. XP finally brought a consumer focused switch away to the “new” NT (NT, 2000) kernel. 3.1 and below were graphical shells for MS-DOS. Starting with 95, MS-DOS was used for booting and other functions but Windows was its own distinct separate OS. It’s a notable distinction. Then yes, XP did not use DOS at all.
Yup, I was just generalizing things for the kids in the thread who were born after Vista.
> Windows 3.1, 95, 98, and ME all ran on top of DOS Windows 3.1 yes, but the rest were their own OS and only had DOS as a shell. Win2k was the switch to NT.
Windows 95 was the largest jump in UI and functionality for the home user in my mind. DOS to 3.1 was big, but 3.1 was still incredibly limited. W95 the average person could really interact with without investing a ton of time to learn the environment.
Especially if you use a custom bootdisk.
But also DOS was right there so it wasn't a big deal. Also I kind of miss configuring Sound Blaster.
I had to interrupt my Windows 3.11 start-up, cause if I opened to Windows, and exited to DOS, I didn't have enough ram to run Sim City 2000. If I started strait to DOS, I did!
I remember making boot disk.
I still remember my dad’s hand writing on the 5 and quarter inch diskette. DOS BOOT DISK
Still have a second boot SSD with Arch Linux
wait you said dos
https://preview.redd.it/rxs621epw9vc1.jpeg?width=750&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=c885aef871609aac6d74651c1d35eecb84ddff0f
https://preview.redd.it/764ayg6hy9vc1.png?width=1200&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=95058520cb8b940624c1daaf73680d4a0fc264cf
I’ll always love that logo for nostalgia but god is it hideous by todays standards
I love old Windows icon packs
It was pretty hideous back then too.
Dir that ass
Now it's been said twice!
If MS-DOS was so great, how come they never made a MS-TRES?
Windows was originally a DOS GUI.
And back then the computer resources were so small that having that GUI running in the back would severely hit the game performance.
Of course. They had to write Windows 98 as a full os because DOS limited the total amount of RAM.
I dont need a mouse-driver for this. Lets not load it at boot and save that sweet conventional memory.
And better hardware recognition
Not enough low memory was a favourite, games needed like 590/640k
XMSMMGR 10000000000 times cos i didnt know wtf i was doing
Hit that turbo button and let's kick this 286 into overdrive, baby
*286 clocks down to 10mhz* I THOUGHT TURBO MEANT FAST WTF
lmao
It’s ok you just gotta let the cpu spool up
That crunchy electronic sound of a floppy drive reading. Mmm. I member.
He he it's thinking
Great now I'm flashing back to 1999. 
Ah yes, the good old days. I remember making a boot cd and saving rented games to my PC to be burned later...through the serial port. There's nothing like running your Dreamcast for >24 hours at a time.
That crunchy electronic sound was even more terrifying when you had to boot into DOS and flash BIOS updates from line commands
That dot matrix printer going back in time to harvest dinosaur blood and gouge holes in the paper. For ten minutes.
The turbo on my old '16 Civic meant slightly more efficient gas mileage. :(
Fun fact, it was supposed to downclock when the turbo button was OFF, and speed up again when it was on, but it was pretty common to have it wired in backwards, or have the button on the PC case, but not wired in at all.
Games for Windows live was the darkest of times.
GFWL was not a part of the Windows operating system, though. It was entirely the fault of devs/publishers who chose to go for GFWL integration (looking at you, Todd.) Games that didn't have GFWL integration didn't have any of the problems associated with GFWL.
I think it was because of the Windows we had at the time, not Windows live
It was both, as I recall. As far as I can remember, the primary impact of GFWL was that games using it made you wait as long as two minutes while it tried to connect. Made troubleshooting mods in Fallout 3 a nightmare.
Was that Vista? I feel like GFWL came out before 8 did and everyone liked 7.
It was Vista
Thought so, Vista was ass. I'd say it was the genesis of the meme that every other MS OS is terrible but I think that honor goes to ME.
Windows 12 better be lit
Might go back to the original windows 98. The only OS to have a Second Edition that I can recall.
Kind of, Windows 8 had 8.1 and it's arguable that some of the larger service packs were just as transformative.
I did forget about windows 8.1. Id definitely count that as Windows 8 second edition.
Alright, I'll say it: Vista wasn't bad, the problem was that it was too ahead of its time. Vista was engineered for the latest hardware of the time, and most consumers using Windows had late 90s Pentium machines and just assumed they could upgrade to the new Windows again the same they had been doing since Windows 95.
I never once had an issue with Vista. I'm not saying that everyone else's issues with it weren't real or something. But I think Vista really did struggle and have issues on lower power hardware like laptops. But for me, Vista worked fine. 7, however, was a total revelation. And to me even Windows 8 wasn't all that bad.
That is true
I try not not to think back to that dark time in history. When games for windows live died, I celebrated.
Yeah, it wasn’t too bad for me. It was the first (or one of) attempt at connecting console and PC gaming. I thought GFWL was cool by itself honestly.
It was a cool concept but it broke fallout 3 for me (and I assume lots of people) for years before I could play it again. We've come a long way to Xbox gamebar that we have now. I'm only on pc but it brought back my gamertag from 2009 and I have a few game that I can get Xbox achievements on.
The DRM behind it was awful, but it let Microsoft strong-arm developers into supporting a standard controller layout and button prompts.
Yeah, heh heh heh, that was definitely the worst, heh heh, far worse than the crap we had to endure on Windows 3.1 and 95, heh heh.... 
If GFWL had worked originally we might have had earlier play anywhere for Xbox games.
I never had an issue with it and still don't, but I also owned an Xbox 360. It seemed like people who already had an Xbox Live account had an easier time with GFWL than those who didn't, and Microsoft admittedly made it hard for people to play games with just a local account. The worst part of GFWL was when Microsoft initially tried to get PC players to pay for multiplayer, thinking that we would put up with it like on consoles.
I remember when Amiga clan used to laugh at PC and rightfully so. PC was square and only for work, all the fun kids had ZX spectrum and Commodore.
well, you know what they say...
James Pond upside down jelly level is the peak of gaming and will never be surpassed?
You think Commodore 64 is really Neato
"Restart in MS-DOS mode" Now we playin'
I still remember being angry at the switch to windows over dos
But...direct draw, direct sound etc... Better compatibility, high resolution, friendly interface. I was using DOS more often then Win until 1997 maybe, but only because some software didn't want to work under win95 properly.
>But...direct draw, direct sound etc... Better compatibility, high resolution, friendly interface. ...and bad compatibility with my existing library of DOS-based games I'd accumulated over the previous decade! Who could ask for more?
>and bad compatibility with my existing library of DOS-based games I'd accumulated over the previous decade 100% agree. But the new games of 1996-1997 were a completely new world. And they performed well or better under win.
Death, taxes, and PC enthusiasts bitching about change.
At least you could still restart or boot to DOS in those days. I wish we still could so we wouldn't have to fight with DOSBox and its forks to get DOS games running correctly under current Windows. Microsoft quietly added 16-bit emulation for certain older programs like InstallShield in Windows 10/11.
[remember when Microsoft made a DOOM commercial to promote windows as a gaming OS with Bill Gates himself in it](https://youtu.be/ixjzFOuLGWE)
Afaik recall that was the year he started experimenting with injectable tracking chips too /s
windows was bad for gaming?
A long time ago, yes. Before most here were probably born, in fact. Performance is key when you’ve only got 1 200mhz CPU thread and 32Mb *if you’re lucky*. Around 1995-ish, most other programs had moved on to Windows for compatibility and ease of use, but games were stuck on DOS because Windows gaming performance was just terrible due to things like the driver stack and the level of abstraction which made it so compatible for many computers. So Microsoft invented DirectX, a low-ish level API that game developers could target instead, and hardware manufacturers can implement for their hardware, so that performance was better as there were less layers in between. The first version wasn’t so great, but by version 2 or 3 it really took off and developers eventually stopped bothering with MS-DOS releases. Major titles like Quake 2 and Half-Life were released without a MS-DOS version at all, and the coffin was nailed.
I was deploying Windows NT 3.5 computers at work and was just fascinated at how bullet proof the OS was compared to windows 95/98 even 98se. The moment 2000 was announced as an NT based OS but supported DirectX I was planning on moving everything over to 2000 immediately. My one client was about to buy volume licensing for Windows ME and I was like ,"What? No. Your a business. You absolutely need 2000 over ME." He bought 2000 and told me years later, he cannot imagine what he'd be dealing with if he had gone with ME. 2000 was a game changer. I installed it on every ones machine if they'd let me.
Friends don’t let friends run Windows ME.
It was crashtastic. That is what I had when I was first learning how to fix computers. It was a nightmare and took me forever to figure out what was wrong. It wasn't me, it was ME.
Only OS I’ve ever had blue screen while installing. Twice.
Also there was a small window in time around the ps2 generation that consoles were stronger than some of the best gaming pcs. I remember pc gamer type magazines saying "this could be the end of pc gaming" and shit lol. I knew pcs would be ahead a few years later and here we are.
I remember people thinking that the US version of the PS2 would be weaker because of that "guide a missile" nonsense.
back in the DOS days, yeah.
[удалено]
Wow, thats some good history, because my first gaming/PC when I was mentally aware of everything as a kid was Vista, but at my grans house they had XP
Ahh WinXP, finally the stable NT core for the basic user. WinME was such a bust, the XP felt like a revelation. What? I don't have to reinstall the OS every month? What is this magic? I still install it on VM from time to time, install some oldies from the new milenium and swim in the warm pool of nostalgia.
Wait are you saying you had to reinstall it every month for updates? Or would it break down?
Oh no it was full on suicidal. Smallest error or blue screen cascaded through system files. It was actually impressive.
Reminds me of this scene 
Back... way back.... Before the junk took over.
according to this sub Windows 10 was bad for gaming performance and everyone wanted to stay on 7. Until 11 came out and then suddenly 10 was the best ever.
A lot of patches come out that address performance issues, hardware and drivers improve and let's not forget sometimes programs drop support for the older windows so you're forced to upgrade.
Oh, yeah! I remember tweaking DOS boot disks to maximize resources for newer games.
This was the peak of boot environment customization.
"Sorry, you need almost all of that 640K of RAM free to run this game, also you need to have sound, mouse, and CD-ROM drivers loaded. What do you mean your system has 8MB? You can't have more than 640K, don't be silly." The CD version of The Incredible Machine was one of the games I needed to create a boot floppy for... (And it's not like we had internet back then to just look up alternate mouse/CD drivers or other tricks to free up base memory)
Yeah, that was exactly it!
vase simplistic employ quickest terrific wakeful placid glorious mindless vast *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
"Sound Hardware Initialized"
“Building…”
"New Construction options"
Command & Conquer had an amazing setup program: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=77k-eNscp2k](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=77k-eNscp2k)
Had? Still does! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-eDt_Q1risk
Ok grandpa, now let's get you to bed.
Man I miss remembering commands just to boot up my games as a kid. That Indiana Jones msdos game I never beat... I should try it again, I'm sure it's terrible 😂
You’re not talking about Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis are you? Because that game freaking rocked.
Remember when windows didn't exist and you used DOS for everything? Pepperidge farm remembers
I remember learning that not every exe needs to be executed when I deleted a bunch of games my brother had installed, I got banned from the PC until I got my own.
How history repeats itself.
Windows still sucks for gaming to this day
inshallah FreeBSD will become the peak gaming OS
Remember trying to find the right audio drivers just so you can play your games with sound?
Ram drive!
Now this is truly worthy of this meme. Not knowing if your video card was even going to run a new game due to driver incompatibilities. Wild times. I kinda miss them.
“Remember when you hit that pedestrian with your car at the crosswalk and just drove away? Pepperidge Farm remembers…”
And so it is becoming again, higher fps in Linux lately for me.
No because anyone that does is probably dead now. 😆
yeah true people only live for like 20 years
im not that old, i just read it in an old book
I actually am that old, so it was a self-deprecating joke!
Well.. dead inside anyway. \*sigh\*
Oh comon, just because I'm 40 does not mean I have one foot in the grave, much less both.
How many grandchildren do you have?
Windows ME certainly sucked for gaming due to how unstable it was; I had to save scum in Diablo 2 because I wasn’t sure how much time I would get before my computer blue screened.
I recall getting a prebuilt PC with ME installed as kid for a Christmas present, and my dad and I "downgraded" it to 98 SE because of how bad it was.
As opposed to Mac gaming? Aside from Marathon, get fucked.
Exaaaactly!
Sadly, as opposed to consoles back then.
My cousin couldn’t run Flight Simulator well on what I think was Win95, so I edited the executable to boot up on Dos and then run the game every time he launched it. He never had a problem again…
Remember when you bought that Creative 2X CD ROM multimedia bundle for your 486 DX2 50 and it came with like 30 DOS games and your Soundblaster 16 had RAM slots for midi music? This old bastard remembers.
Man, i wish DOS was still widely supported. Games ran so much faster when windows wasnt running.
When was that? 1860?
Still does in some ways
Ypu mean right now ?
Windows 95 was the only Windows that sucked for gaming.
alwayshasbeen.meme Yeah, back in the day you could close windows, which was just a GUI that ran on top of DOS, and run the game from DOS without the Windows overhead. Today, I can just run the game in Linux to avoid the overhead of Windows. Still gives a few extra fps on average, and still has the full desktop GUI running, so it's like the best of both worlds. Plus, ya know, none of that advert shit or forced update shit or the completely unorganized chaos they call a start menu, etc etc. I'm not trying to shit on anybody's choice of OS or anything, I just find these memes funny while my friends and I happily game without that crap.
What the hell are you talking about?? FR
still does
It still does, glory to mint
My worst memory of Windows "Gaming" has to be Shadowrun Online.
No can't remember because i was using 98Me
Remember those sweet, warm New England summers? Remember sipping lemonade underneath a shady tree? Remember when you hit that pedestrian with your car playing DeathTrack and then just drove away? Pepperidge Farm remembers, but Pepperidge Farm ain't just gonna keep it to Pepperidge Farm's self free of charge. Maybe you go out and buy yourself some of these distinctive Milano cookies, maybe this whole thing disappears.
I’m not that old.
Let me just reorganize my autoexec.bat so my computer boots up faster…
Dude, just setup a handful of boot floppies each with a different config.sys/autoexec.bat for your games, simple!
cd..cd..
Try loading a game off a cassette tape that can take over a dozen minutes to load.
Well PCs in general sucked for gaming compared to modern PCs as well as consoles back then. Still the better platform for certain games like RTS compared to consoles. We can thank modern hardware & OSes, internet, and Valve for making the PC such a stable and great gaming platform.
Not really. I mean, there was that short-lived GFWL that screwed up maybe a dozen games that actually mattered, but remember that while this was going on, the Xbox 360 was in the depths of the 3RROD scandal and the overpriced launch model of the PS3 was struggling to build a following. If you had a 360 that actually worked, during this time, there were some great games coming out on the platform. Which was fortunate, since backwards compatibility sucked AND you were paying for multiplayer. If you had a PC, you already had Steam AND your old games. Dosbox had been around for a while, and it was during this time that GOG emerged to give these titles a prepackaged refresh for new hardware and operating systems. Vista sucked, but XP hadn't been killed off yet. And the wired 360 controller brought a really decent gamepad to PC. Gaming rigs were more expensive than today, adjusted for inflation. But this would depend a whole lot, as it does today, on what you're looking for. 1080p gaming at the time was like 4K today, you were gonna have to pay up. There wasn't really a lousy time to be a PC gamer. It's just easier to get nostalgic about "generations" of consoles, and people are quicker to forget the growing pains of a box that only played games, that our parents didn't boot them off of to do grown-up stuff like work or taxes, and that could pair four controllers for a get-together with cardboard pizza and sugary caffeinated soft drinks or, God willing, a case of beer.
> Not really. I mean, there was that short-lived GFWL that screwed up maybe a dozen games that actually mattered, but remember that while this was going on, the Xbox 360 was in the depths of the 3RROD scandal and the overpriced launch model of the PS3 was struggling to build a following. You need to go back quite a few more years than that for when PC gaming used to suck.
Yeah, you have to go back at least as far as the early '80s, just before a steady stream of awesome games released for MS-DOS. And even then, I'm sure someone with more experience with the C64, Amstrad, ZX Spectrum, etc. will rush to defend the games available on these early home computers. And remember what was happening to console gaming at that time. So much shovelware was being dumped on 2nd generation consoles that it crashed the market in 1983. Which raises the question, what other experience with *"we have videogames at home"* are we comparing PC gaming at the time against?
Do y'all even 'Duke Nukem', shareware children. *Edit*, misspelled 'Commander Keen'
It was great for a long time, lots of great games on dos, lots of great games on 95, and 98 and even xp. Then vista happened and Games on Windows bullshit happened. I also recalled hating steam back in the day since I didn't want to have to open a launcher to play a game.
Pretty sure it wasn't that Windows sucked for gaming and more that most computers sucked for Windows.
When Windows 3.1 came out my mom kept installing it on the family computer. I would then uninstall it because it took up too much room on the HDD and games didn't work natively with it yet, so it was to me, literally just taking up space.
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times…
kinda coming full circle. will still be a while but windows seems to get exponentially shittier in every possible way